THE SECRET MARRIAGE.
Reverend Silas Van de Lear was drawing his latest breaths in the house
of one of his elder sons, and only his lips were seen to move in silent
prayer, when a younger fellow-clergyman entering, to a cluster of his
cloth attending there, said audibly:
"This is a strange _denouement_ to the great Kensington scandal, which
has happened this afternoon."
The large, voluptuous lady with the slowly declining eyelids raised them
quietly as in languid surprise.
"You mean the Zane murder? What is it?" asked a minister, while others
gathered around, showing the ministry to have human curiosity even in
the hour and article of death.
"Miss Agnes Wilt, the especial favorite of our dying patriarch here, was
married to young Andrew Zane some time before his father died. There was
no murder in the case. Zane the elder, in one of his frequent fits of
wild and arrogant rage, which were little less than insanity, killed his
partner, Rainey, and in as sudden remorse took his own life."
"What was the occasion of Zane's rage?"
"That is not quite clear, but the local population here is in a violent
reaction against the accusers of young Zane and his wife. The church
recovers a valuable woman in Agnes Zane."
Mrs. Knox Van de Lear had a vial of smelling salts in her hand, and this
vial dropping suddenly on the floor called attention to the fact that
the lady had a little swooning turn. She was herself again in a minute,
and her eyes slowly unclosed and lifted their tender curtains prettily.
"I am so glad for dear Agnes," she said with a natural loudness in that
hushed room. "It even made me forget papa to find Agnes innocent."
The dying minister seemed to catch the words. A ministerial colleague
bent down to hear his low articulation:
"Agnes innocent!" said Silas Van de Lear, and strove to clasp his hands.
"The praying of the righteous availeth much!"
The physician said the good man's pulse ceased to beat at that minute,
and they raised around his scarcely cold remains a hymn to heaven.
Mean time, at the alderman's court, a surprising scene was witnessed.
For a few minutes everybody was in a frenzy of delight, and Duff Salter
was the hero of the hour. The alderman made no effort to discipline any
person; people hugged and laughed, and entreated to shake hands with
Andrew Zane, and in the pleasing confusion Calvin Van de Lear slunk out,
white as one condemned to be whipped.
"Now! now! We will! Yes!" said the sententious old alderman. "Come to
order. Andrew Zane must be sworn!"
At this moment the Kensington volunteer fire apparatus stopped opposite
the alderman's office and began to peal its bells merrily. The young
husband's obstinacy slowly giving way, seemed to be gone entirely when,
searching the room with his eye, he detected the flight of Calvin Van de
Lear. He kissed the little book as if it were a box of divine balm, and
raised his voice, looking still tenderly at Agnes, and addressing Duff
Salter:
"Will you examine me, my father's friend?"
"Yes, now! You will!" exploded the alderman.
"No, take your own method, thou alternate of the late Mike Donovan,"
exclaimed Duff Salter with a smile.
"I never thought there could be an excuse for my behavior," said Andrew
Zane, "until this unexpected kind treatment had encouraged me. Indeed,
my friends, I am in every alternative unfortunate. To defend myself I
must reflect upon the dead. I will not make a defence, but tell my story
plainly.
"My father was a man of deeds--a kind, rude business man. He loved me
and I worshipped him, though our apposite tempers frequently brought us
in conflict. Neither of us knew how to curb the other or be curbed in
turn. Above all things I learned to fear my father's will; it was
invincible.
"My wife and I grew up in my widower father's family, and fell in love,
and had an understanding that at a proper season we would marry. That
season could not be long postponed when Agnes's increasing beauty and my
ardor kept pace together. I sought an occasion to break the secret to my
father, and his reception of it filled me with terror. 'Marry Agnes!'
he replied. 'You have no right to her. Your mother left her to me. I
may marry her myself.'
"If he had never formed this design before it was now pursued with his
well-known tireless energy. The suggestion needed no other encouragement
than her beauty, ever present to inflame us both. Her household habits
and society were to his liking; he offered me everything but that which
embraced all to me. 'Go to Europe!' he said. 'Take a wife where you
will; but Agnes you shall not have. I will give you money, pleasure, and
independence, but I love where you have looked. Agnes will be your
mother, not your wife!'
"Alas! gentlemen, this purpose of my father was not mere tyranny; he
loved her, indeed, and that was the insurmountable fact. My betrothed
had too much reason to know it. We mingled our tears together and
acknowledged our dependence and duty, but we loved with that youthful
fulness which cannot be mistaken nor dissuaded. In our distress we went
to that kind partner whom my father had raised from an apprentice to be
his equal, and asked him what to do. He told us to marry while we could.
Agnes preferred an open marriage as least in consequences, and involving
every trouble in the brave outset. I hoped to wean my father from his
wilfulness, and yet protect my affection by a secret marriage, to which
with difficulty I prevailed on my betrothed to consent. After our
marriage I found my husband's domain no less invaded by my father's
suit, until life became intolerable and it was necessary to speak. Poor,
brave Rainey, feeling keenly for us, fixed the time and place. He had
seldom crossed my father, and I trembled for his safety, but never
could have anticipated what came to pass.
"Mr. Rainey said to us, 'I will tell your father, while we are crossing
the river some evening in a batteau, that you and Agnes are married, and
his suit is fruitless. He will be unable to do worse than sit still and
bear it in the small limits of the boat, and before we touch the other
shore will get philosophy from time and consideration.'
"That plan was carried out. Shall I recount the dreadful circumstances
again? Spare me, I entreat you!"
"No, I won't! The whole truth!" exclaimed the stern magistrate. "Tell
it!"
"You are making no mistake, my young friend," said Duff Salter. "It will
all be told very soon."
"As we started from Treaty Island, on that dark winter night," continued
Andrew Zane, growing pale while he spoke, "Mr. Rainey said to me, 'Go in
the bow. You are not to speak one word. I will face your father astern.'
The oarsman, Donovan, had a hard pull. The first word I heard my father
say was, 'That is none of your affair.' 'It is everybody's affair,'
answered Mr. Rainey, 'because you make it so. Behave like a gentleman
and a parent. The young people love each other.' 'I have the young
lady's affections,' said my father. 'You are making her miserable,' said
Mr. Rainey, 'and are deceiving yourself. She begins to hate you.' 'You
are an insolent liar!' exclaimed my father. 'If you mix in this business
I will throw you out of the firm.' 'That is no intimidation to me,'
answered his partner. 'Prosperity can never attend the business of a
cruel and unjust man. I shall be a brother to Andrew and a father to
Agnes, since you would defraud them so. William Zane, I will see them
married and supported!' With that my father threw himself in mere
physical rage upon Mr. Rainey. They both arose, and Mr. Rainey shook
himself loose and cried, 'You are outwitted, partner. I saw them
married! They are man and wife!'
"With this my father's rage had no expression short of recklessness. He
always carried arms, and was unconquerable. His ready hand had sought
his weapon, I think, hardly consciously. His dismay and indignation for
an instant destroyed his reason at Mr. Rainey's sudden statement of
fact.
"My God! can I further particularize on such a scene? In a moment of
time I saw before my eyes a homicide of insanity, a suicide of remorse;
and to end all, the sailor in the boat, as if set crazy by these
occurrences, leaped overboard also."
This narrative, given with rising energy of feeling by Andrew Zane, was
heard with breathless attention. Andrew paused and glanced at his wife,
whose face was bathed with the inner light of perfect relief. The
greater babe of secrecy had ceased to travail with her.
"Mr. Magistrate," said the young husband, "as I am under my oath, I can
only relate the acts which followed from the inference of my feelings.
My first sense was that of astonishment too intense not to appear unreal
and even amusing. It seemed to me that if I would laugh out loud all
would come back, as delusions yield to scepticism and mockery. But it
was too cold not to be real, the scene and persons were too familiar to
be erroneous. I had to realize that I was in one of the great and
terrible occasional convulsions of human nature. Do you know how it next
affected me? With an instant's sense of sublimity! I said to myself,
'How dared I marry so much beauty and womanly majesty? Doing so, I have
tempted the old gods and their fates and furies. This is poetical
punishment for my temerity.' Still all the while I was laboring at the
one scull left in the boat while my brain was fuming so, and listening
for sounds on the water. I heard the sailor cry twice, and then his
voice fainted away. I began to weep at the oar while I strained upon it,
and called 'Help!' and implored God's intervention. At last I sat down
in the boat, worn out and in despair, and let it drift down all the
city's front, past lights and glooms and floating ice, and wished that I
were dead. My father's kindness and all our disagreements rose to mind,
and it seemed God's punishment that I had married where his intentions
were. Yet to know the truth of this, I said a prayer upon my knees in
the wet boat while my teeth chattered, and before the end of my prayer
had come I was thinking of my wife's pure name, and how this would spot
her as with stains of blood unless I could explain it.
"When I reached this stage of my exalted sensibilities I was nearly
crazed. There had been no witness of our marriage except the minister,
and he was already dead. We had been married at the country parsonage of
an old retired minister beyond Oxford church, on the road from Frankford
town, as we drove out one afternoon, and I prevailed with my
conscientious wife to yield her scruples to our heart's necessity.
'Great God!' I thought aloud--for none could hear me there--'how
dreadfully that secret marriage will compromise my wife! Who will
believe us without a witness of what I must assert--a story so
improbable that I would not believe it myself? I must say that I married
my wife secretly from my father's house, confessing deceit for both of
us, and with Agnes's religious professions, a sin in the church's
estimation. If there could be an excuse for me, the strict people of
Kensington will accord none to her. They will charge on her maturer mind
the whole responsibility, paint her in the colors of ingratitude, and
find in her greatest poverty the principal motive. Yes, they may be
wicked enough to say she compassed the death of my father by my hands,
to get his property.'
"I had proceeded thus far when the terror of our position became
luminous like the coming fire on a prairie, which shows everything but a
way of escape. 'Where is your father?' they would ask of me in
Kensington. 'He is drowned.' 'How drowned?' 'He shot himself.' 'Why did
he shoot himself?' 'Because I had married his ward.' 'But his partner is
gone too.' 'He is murdered.' 'Why murdered?' 'Because he interceded for
me.' 'Where is your witness?' 'He has disappeared.' I saw the wild
improbability of this tale, and thought of past notorious quarrels with
my father ended by my voluntary absence. There were but two points that
seemed to stick in my nervous mind: 'It never would do to tell our
marriage at that moment, and I must find that sailor, who might still be
living.'"
"He found me, sure enough, begorra!" exclaimed Mike Donovan, giving the
relief of laughter to that intense narrative.
"Cowardly as you may call my resolution, gentlemen, it was all the
resolution I had left. To partake of the inheritance left me by both
partners in our house I feared to do. 'Let us do the penance of
suspicious separation,' I said to Agnes; 'as your husband I command you
to let me go!' She yielded like a wife, and stood my hostage in
Kensington for all those melancholy months. I had just learned the place
for which the bark which passed us on that eventful night had cleared,
when the two bullet-pierced bodies were discovered in the ice. That
night I sailed for Wilmington, North Carolina. When I arrived there the
bark was gone for the Mediterranean, but I heard of my sailor, wounded,
in her hospital. I sailed from Charleston for Cuba, and from Cuba to
Cadiz, and thence I embarked for Trieste. At Trieste I found the ship,
but Donovan had sailed for Liverpool. From Liverpool I tracked him to
the River Plate, and thence to Panama. You will ask how I lived all
those months? Ask him."
He turned to Duff Salter.
"Mr. Magistrate," spoke Duff Salter, a little confused. "I sent him
drafts at his request. He knew me to be the resident executor, and wrote
to me. I did it because of the pity I had for Agnes, and my faith in her
assurance that he was innocent."
"Good! Yes!" exclaimed the magistrate. "I would have done the same
myself."
"I returned with my man," concluded Andrew Zane. "I was now so confident
that I did not fear; but a hard obstinacy, coming on me at times, I
know not how, impelled me to postpone my vindication and make a test of
everybody. I was full of suspicion and bitterness--the reaction from so
much undeserved anxiety. I was the ghost of Kensington, and the spy upon
my guardian, but the unknown sentry upon my wife's honor all the while.
"Magistrate!"--the young man turned to the alderman, and his face
flushed--"is there no punishment at law for men, and women too, who have
cruelly persecuted my wife with anonymous letters, intended to wound her
brave spirit to the quick?"
"Plenty of it," said the magistrate. "Yes, I will. I will warrant them
all."
"I will not forget it," said Andrew Zane darkly.
"My husband, forget everything!" exclaimed Agnes. "Except that we are
happy. God has forgiven us our only deceit, which has been the
temptation of many in dear old Kensington."
The old magistrate arose. "Case dismissed," he said: "Dinner is ready in
the next room for Mr. and Mrs. Zane, and Judge Salter. I fine you all a
dinner. Yes, yes! I will!"